Adapting to environmental changes is critical for our survival. The brain’s ability to build up knowledge about the world that enables us to benefit from our previous experience has been a long-standing, central topic in psychology and neuroscience. However, research into the neurobiology underlying knowledge build-up and updating is now just beginning. In my lab we develop new rodent tasks to tap into how animals build-up knowledge such as the Object Space Task and the HexMaze. We also use one session learning tasks such as the watermaze to do translational projects in humans and rodents. We combine these tasks with electrophysiology, pharmacology, fMRI and immediate early gene expression analysis to investigate how sleep contributes to memory consolidation.